Friday, November 26, 2010

The majority of successful leaders tend to be sociopaths... at least to some extent. The charismatic, single-purposed leader who grabs at your heart as well as your mind is much more interested in your utility and loyalty, than in your friendship and approval. He or she is generally very bright, very intuitive, an excellent planner and a serious implementer. More often than not, he or she is charming and entertaining in certain ways, but, for the most part, these people are purpose-driven and lonely despite their magnetic qualities. They don't bond well with others -- but they make superb leaders. They don't crave love and admiration as much as the majority of people -- they want achievement of their objectives.

Their obsessive propensity for victory at almost any cost makes them natural commanders, but makes them poor followers, conformists and foot-soldiers. They are not encumbered or slowed by a preoccupation with what others think, unless those others are of great utility to them in their business or political campaign success. Sociopaths are very seductive and can be very good flatterers -- their offerings of praise move followers to do their bidding.

This is not to say that if one is a sociopath, he or she will become a leader...it is merely an observation (borne out statistically through a great deal of psychological profiling, behavioral studies and correlative analysis) that most successful leaders happen to possess sociopathic character profiles.

To be simple about the matter, sometimes a sociopath is a destructive user and discarder of others; but sometimes a sociopath possessing genuine, spirited passion and long-term ambition for a cause can use the same set of attributes that may many detest in him or her, to be a leader of a social movement, a country, or a corporation. The deciding elements differentiating the destructive sociopath from the great leader are that the great leader has:

1. A passionate belief;

2. A vision and a plan to achieve that vision;

3. Genuine obsession and focus on a cause;

4. The will to lead;

5. The self-knowledge that he or she has a sociopathic propensity, and accepts that fact as a limiting factor to be held in check, and to be counterbalanced by the social skills or other abilities of other people, making it necessary for him or her to be a team-builder if only for the purpose of acquiring the complementary skills required to get the job done.

An excellent piece of writing from the minds at BigThink sheds more light on this slightly frightening phenomenon.

Adolf Hitler was a sociopath...but so was Winston Churchill. For better or for worse, they mobilize and get things done -- they can unify a fragmented people, and they can slaughter them, as well. It's a matter of their core value systems (their motivation and resultant agenda), and the degree to which they acknowledge and adjust for their own sociopathy.

More mysterious: Sociopaths can be leaders because of a certain aspect of otherwise typical "follower" and "normal" personalities (greater than 70% of most human beings) discovered by a behavioral researcher by the name of Milgram -- the results of his experiments and study are summed up in the ominous words printed below...

Paul Lawrence: Well the question becomes you know, do these people without conscience, let’s call them PWOC’s is a rather shorthand way for that. Talking about them getting into leadership positions and they probably get into them out of all proportion to a percentage often population, we estimate they maybe 2% to 4% of the population are such people. And we think they get into the leadership positions maybe 8% or 10% of the time, but you know, any percent is a mess because they can wreak havoc in exploiting other people. They probably get there more than others because it’s the only thing they’re looking for in life. You know we got normal people have got a lot of things they’re trying to get in life. They’re trying to have healthy families and good relationships with friends and so forth. And if you’re aren’t paying any attention to that, you can probably get to a power position more readily, because you can be pretty cunning and pretty smart, and a lot of them are very charming. You know, they don’t come across, a lot of them, as evil, they come across as very charming people and they can worm their way into those spots and we have to be cautious.

A lot of history records the fact that such people have gotten into important positions. The whole Dark Ages was a period in which those people got into leadership positions in governments on a large-scale basis and there was a tremendous amount of warfare and suffering during those times. I think the whole Renaissance has been an effort to move away from that kind of leadership. I think the effort to put together the Constitution of the United States, which I discuss at some length in the book, was a effort to create a government that can protect itself against such kind of leadership. Making it... by balancing the power and not getting power concentrated in any one office is a way of avoiding that kind of leadership.
So it’s come up throughout history and that is thoroughly discussed and we see it not only, obviously, in business, we can name and do name prominent leaders in business who are highly suspect of having that feature.

But the point is, they do get into some of those roles and... For instance, take the scandal in Wall Street with the crash in the market and the resulting worldwide depression. I discussed that in a chapter which I come out with a fairly bold statement which is still not the way in which the government is defining what happened. There were a few, there didn’t have to be many, and they didn’t necessarily didn’t have to be all CEOs of the big banks who saw the opportunity to buy up subprime mortgages—which were really written without much interest in whether they recipient could repay them and so were subject to a lot of foreclosures—but the banks that wrote them knew they could instantly sell them to the Wall Street banks because they were collecting these mortgages wholesale so they could slice and dice them up into a sort of a mysterious packages and sell them as Triple-A bonds certified by the grading agencies, and collect 100% on the dollar for those bonds to people who were trustees of pension funds and endowments, and we sitting in responsibility to make those investments in bonds, by law they had to do it so those bonds looked pretty good to them. They didn’t realize that the bonds were probably... they were phony. They were really worth maybe only 50% of their face value at the moment they bought them. And that was the con, the absolute fraud that was pulled off. And we still don’t have a clear understanding by the public or even by the Department of Justice that that is what happened, and we should be prosecuting those people and getting the evidence out that will prove that those are criminal actions.

Question: What would we do if genetics could pinpoint someone as a psychopath?

Paul Lawrence: Well, obviously, that’s an extremely difficult question. It’s going to raise a lot of moral questions. What do we do with people that are positively identified by DNA of being psychopathic types? And these are characteristics that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t choose them, they were simply an accident of birth, yet nevertheless makes them a hazard to other people that they have to find some what to protect themselves from, somewhat to constrain people, so they can’t do things like Hitler did to so many people in the world.

Well, you know, I don’t have all the answers to that. I have thought about it, a lot of people thought about it. I think, you know, it is one possibility when you’re considering candidates for a powerful position and considering who is going to get a job, you can say, "Well, maybe we ought to test them and see that they get a license, so that they’re qualified," the way we do with people that are going to be airline pilots or the people that are going to be a number of professional roles like doctors and lawyers and so forth—they have to produce a test for being licensed for those roles. Well, if it’s a powerful role, we could say that part of the licensing process is to test your DNA to see whether or not you’re, you know, an innate psychopath because we do not want such people in such power positions. "You’ve got to go find something else to do in this world besides that because we cannot... we cannot trust you with that kind of power. "

As just one idea. I don’t say it’s the answer, I think we’ve got to think of a lot of ideas and put our minds to work on it.

TNNWC Group, LLC empowers emerging enterprises locally, worldwide and inter-globally by providing 1) informational publications and products; 2) an indispensible suite of crucial, unparalleled services for business planning, development, growth, marketing and capitalization, which are offered to all of our Members who are all 3) interactively involved within a growing, mutually-supportive collaborative, cooperative community of individuals and businesses. We are run by entrepreneurial people, and we live to serve entrepreneurial people and the business initiated through their inspiration… from the garage-based technological start-up, to the “small business” wanting to break free of its limitations and grow larger at an accelerated but sustainable pace. We Empower Emerging Enterprises™ - not with “happy talk” and “grandiose ideas”… but with real tools and expert interpersonal guidance to use each of them for their optimal effectiveness. Visit us at TNNWC Group, LLC. - Join us. We have so much to offer you. Our philosophy is simple: UNITE AND CONQUER.

Marketing has all but ceased to involve relationships and two-way communications (personalities aren't conveyed too effectively by an automated "press a number" answering service, or in a 140-character social media status update, i.e., Twitter Litter), and has become a matter of shouting about a product or service and then having an operational protocol for fulfillment. The salesmanship has been leached out; the friendship and familiarity between account representative and client has largely been replaced (inadequately) by automation; the Humanity of the process, the relationship between two or more Human Beings to finalize commerce has been minimized.

As a result, customer and client satisfaction with many companies and brands is very poor and getting worse. Loyalty and retention suffer in these hyper-automated companies because people have a hard-wired, deep-seated need to be in personal contact with other people. If you have a captive client base (as in the case of any government-blessed utility or other monopoly), your clients have no choice but to use your services. They are handed to you -- and you are probably abusing, overcharging and underserving them -- if they could leave you, they would. But most emerging enterprises and non-monopolistic businesses, are fighting harder and harder to gain market share because they do not have a persona.

The companies in the small to medium-sized entrepreneurial market sector are merely burning eachother's margins down, and creating an increasing population of discontented, angry and frustrated customers. These people want to speak with a person who knows them, will listen to them, and be personally responsive to them.

The Human Factor will be a major determinant of success in acquiring and retaining market share in the near future. Since it has become so rare, it will actually be re-introduced as an innovative new way to conduct business. Look for the companies that are returning to a person-to-person customer services and marketing model, and you will see the new leaders in their respective spaces.

People want to be greeted by other people; assisted by other people; listened to by other people -- and they have become increasingly desperate for longer-term, dependable, predictable and comfortable "business friendships" with other people. The consumer market is quitely desperate for communion with their commerce -- and the companies that are willing to re-Humanize in order to provide that "personal touch" are going to grab large chunks of market share.

Think about it. I am saying what you've been thinking. Going just a bit further, the once nostalgic notion of CUSTOMER SERVICE is increasingly becoming an integral part of every business operating in a competitive market space...especially during an uncertain economy. Customers are asking to be seduced, listened to, heard, responded to, and treated attentively and personally. You can gain some insight into what CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PRACTICE entails, and why it's becoming increasingly critical by clicking on the following link:

1. An increase in the number of professional and consulting firms dedicating more of their personnel, marketing and resources to rendering Customer Experience Practice Services to Clients;

2. A growing chasm between the economic viability (and likely the profitability and relative share prices, if their shares or units are publicly-traded) of companies proactively integrating Customer Service Excellence (in the spirit of Total Quality Management - "TQM") and those who merely continue to lure customers in with "me-too" advertisements based upon price, disappoint them with miserable or non-touch service, and lose any prospect of repeat business or referral business. These old-schoolers will be giving up territory and fading away...

Observation:

In choosing a company to commit your investment funds to, or to partner with, take a look at how seriously they are investing in Customer Service Practice and practicing Customer Service Excellence -- they will stand out as winners increasingly often in the months and years to come. Then again, neither the author nor The Global Futurist offer any investment, financial, economic or other advice.

TNNWC Group, LLC empowers emerging enterprises locally, worldwide and inter-globally by providing 1) informational publications and products; 2) an indispensible suite of crucial, unparalleled services for business planning, development, growth, marketing and capitalization, which are offered to all of our Members who are all 3) interactively involved within a growing, mutually-supportive collaborative, cooperative community of individuals and businesses. We are run by entrepreneurial people, and we live to serve entrepreneurial people and the business initiated through their inspiration… from the garage-based technological start-up, to the “small business” wanting to break free of its limitations and grow larger at an accelerated but sustainable pace. We Empower Emerging Enterprises™ - not with “happy talk” and “grandiose ideas”… but with real tools and expert interpersonal guidance to use each of them for their optimal effectiveness. Visit us at TNNWC Group, LLC. - Join us. We have so much to offer you. Our philosophy is simple: UNITE AND CONQUER.

Starting right now and continuing for the next 1 to 3 years, the growth (in terms of GDP and by virtually every other economic measure [except perhaps average household income]) in China will to be at very least two to four times greater than that of the US and Western Europe. China is fast-embracing a conservative brand of capitalism and is becoming (if it has not already become) the world’s greatest superpower.

They are increasingly flexing their muscles and experimenting with their newly-realized power by controlling exports of commodities (Rare Earth Elements, being one example) and by quietly buying up strategic positions in distressed U.S. and European assets.

Having said this, I believe that over the next 12 – 15 months, investors in capital markets, securities and properties in Indonesia and other countries in Southeast Asia will make even greater returns than those obtained by foreign investors in China. Many of these countries, like Singapore, Malaysia and others purchase most of their raw materials from China, add an element of value, and re-sell to the each other and export to the West.

The cost of labor in a number of these countries is significantly lower than that of China (labor costs in China are slowly rising), allowing them very significant margins of profit on items which are no longer affordably produced in the industrialized nations, and which may not be obtained at comparable quality levels from China directly. These other Southeast Asian nations are also hungrier for export opportunities and for inbound foreign investment to bolster their economies, where China is far more insular and restrictive.

Inbound investment into the Pacific Rim and Southeast Asia from some of the wealthier U.S. and Western European dynastic families, operating companies and investment funds (i.e., money under third-party fiduciary management) is increasing

While the economies and capital markets of Asia (inclusive of Southeast Asia) will significantly outperform those of the U.S. and Europe during the next 1 – 3 years, the economies and capital markets of Brazil and Chile will either rival or exceed those of Asia at some time during this same period. This will not likely be the case with any of the other countries in Central and South America, where political and economic instabilities will continue to keep foreign and international investment away. The economy and the sovereign debt status of Mexico will continue a precipitous decline as domestic drug-related violence continues to escalate and challenge government authority, as well as increasing tensions between the United States and Mexico.

Further to this latter point, the immigration-related debates taking place within the United States (i.e., what are the “rights” of illegal aliens residing in the United States) are setting the stage for both 1) border skirmishes between U.S. citizens and military border patrols [on one side] and Mexican nationals trying to enter the U.S. illegally and cross border drug traffickers [on the other side] in states that abut Mexico (such as Arizona, California and Texas), 2) increasing acts of violence against persons of Mexican descent living in the United States.

Between the rise in anti-western rhetoric by the more overtly aggressive Muslim nations and the increasing frustration, humiliation and anger that American citizens are facing when going through security checkpoints at airports, and the increasing of travel warnings which are being issued by agencies of the United States Government to American citizens who would wish to travel to Europe for either pleasure or business (due to an increase in the number of credible threats by Muslim extremists who are specifically targeting U.S. citizens travelling abroad) incidents of racial/ethnic violence in the United States against Muslims and Mosques have already begun to rise in both frequency and severity.

My personal fear about this is that Americans are reaching a temperature tipping point where they are, in increasing percentages, seeing all Muslims as enemies and terrorists. This does bode well for either Muslims or U.S. Citizens.

Expect a steadily-increasing mass exodus (in fact, this exodus has already begun and is proceeding rapidly) of members of the “Baby Boomer” generation from the United States, who are either 1) seeking any possible employment in Asia (to the greatest extent), the Middle East (to a decreasing extent) or some of the more solvent and sensible countries in Europe where US expatriates can hold employment and some dignity, or who are 2) seeking to escape the economy of the United States and take what little assets they may have remaining and head for retirement and new, less-pressured lives in a number of the poorer Latin American countries where a small amount of US dollars can support a much higher standard of living (especially on a fixed income or with a devalued pension or retirement nest egg) than that which is possible within the United States.

The United States will be losing a great deal of its best-educated, most-experienced labor force, as well as the commerce of its would-be retirees. Notice the increasing prevalence and prominence of advertisements in e-media and print media for “inexpensive, luxurious retirement havens,” primarily in non-English-speaking countries where housing, basic subsistence purchases and domestic labor are far less expensive than anything comparable within the US. Sadly, the Baby Boomers, as a group, are of a significant size and hold a great percentage of the former middle-class and upper-middle-class wealth in the United States, which they have begun and will continue taking out of the US with them by any means legally (and illegally) possible.